


Four's a Crowd

by Celaeno



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Gen, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 05:04:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16211993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celaeno/pseuds/Celaeno
Summary: Venom has Eddie. Venom wants Anne, too. The problem is, there's another person in the way. But Venom has ideas on how to handle that.Eddie, meanwhile, gets to try and stop trouble from brewing anymore than it already has. Good luck, Eddie.





	Four's a Crowd

_What are we going to do about him?_

Eddie jolted suddenly, knocked out of the pleasant stream of not-thinking-about-much he’d been enjoying. It had been nice; he felt like he hadn’t gotten much of a chance to do that lately. Most of his brain power lately had been focused on things like ‘not dying’ and ‘trying to figure out what the hell is going on’. A break from the insanity, now that things had settled down (and stopped crashing, or chasing him, or violently exploding) was welcome.

So much for that.

Eddie blinked, feeling like he should know what was going on but was already three steps behind in the conversation. ( _That_ was now a familiar feeling, at least.) “What? Who?”

**_Him_ ** **,** Venom repeated, sounding annoyed that he _had_ to repeat himself. _Dan, the doctor. Anne’s…_ the symbiote trailed off into a growl in the back of his head. _...roadblock,_ he finished, still sounding irritated.

Eddie put up his hands in the universal gesture of ‘woah woah wait’. “ _We_ are not doing anything about Dan. _We_ are going to let him and Anne continue having nice, normal, relatively sane lives-”

_You want her back._ **_I_ ** _want her back, and unlike you,_ **_I_ ** _don’t plan on sitting around and telling myself everything is fine._

“Everything _is_ fine, she’s happy, we should be happy for her, that’s how this works.” How it should work, anyway. If he was being completely honest with himself, it _did_ still hurt-not quite the raw gaping wound it had been a few months ago, but-it hurt. But Anne was happy, and Dan was honestly a perfectly nice, stand-up guy, and Eddie _knew_ the right thing to do was to just be happy for her, and appreciate the new, weirder relationship they had now.

It didn’t make it any easier, though.

Venom growled in the back of his head again and then lunged out suddenly, violently snapping at the bowl of Halloween candy that was sitting on the couch and gulping down funsize bars with no regard for the wrappers. His eye patches-they weren’t proper eyes, not really, Eddie had gotten a crash course in symbiote biology-narrowed as Venom swung back around to look at Eddie directly. His tongue flicked out, darting at a Snickers that was partially impaled on a tooth and dragging it into his maw.

“We should eat him.”

That made Eddie jolt again, shaking his head and again making the universal ‘no no STOP’ flail, which clearly at this point was _not_ crossing species communication barriers. “No! No, we are _not_ eating Dan, that is-that is _really_ not appropriate-”

Venom grinned, an expression that mostly differed from his usual look in that there was slightly more gum showing. “It would remove our roadblock.”

“Do you remember what I told you, about how there’s a lot of good people in this world, and we _don’t eat them_? Dan is one of those good people! Dan helped us-”

Venom hissed suddenly, baring his teeth and letting his tongue loll out. “He helped YOU. He forced ME off of you and stuck me an MRI room until I escaped.”

“The point is-” Eddie held an index finger in front of Venom’s face, half-wondering if he was just asking for it to be bitten off. “The point is, he helped me when he didn’t have to and I appreciate that very much, so we’re not gonna eat him.”

Venom snapped his jaw closed with a snort, turning back again to root around in the candy bowl for a moment. “...What about if I just ate a leg?” he asked after a moment.

“What,” Eddie said, flatly.

Venom didn’t look up from the candy bowl, although he did throw out another tendril to stabilize it and keep it from falling off the couch. “We could eat his leg, to warn him off.”

“We are NOT eating any part of Dan!” Eddie heard his voice hit that certain exasperated pitch and rubbed his face with his hands. Some days-a lot of them, actually-he was pretty sure Venom just liked to wind him up and watch him go.

The symbiote turned away from the bowl, his movements lazier this time. He eyed Eddie with a calculating expression, tilting his head to the side. “It’s not lethal. So you can’t be upset about killing him.”

“That is not the point,” Eddie replied, keeping one hand over his eyes-he had a headache coming on, he could feel it, and he was pretty sure the symbiote healing factor would be no help when the symbiote was the one causing it-and gesturing at Venom with an index finger again. “The point is, whenever we see Anne, we are _not_ gonna maim, mutilate, eat, or otherwise use Dan as a chewtoy. Just because you want her back-”

_“We,”_ Venom corrected, smiling in that unnerving, gum and teeth-filled way. “This is most _definitely_ a ‘we’ thing, Eddie.”

“You barely even know her! You were on her for what, how long-”

“Long enough to make a good impression. And then there’s knowing what _you_ know, Eddie. So I think I can say I know her well enough.” Venom twisted and looped lazily around Eddie’s shoulders, resting his head near Eddie’s chin. “And I know what I want.”

“Okay, well, you know what Anne wouldn’t want? Anne wouldn’t want you to eat her new boyfriend. That’s a really quick way to make her _not like you_.” Eddie paused, considering. “And maybe make her try to set you on fire a little bit.” Anne had proven herself more than able to roll with the punches and go after alien weaknesses as soon as she had a chance. It was just one more thing to endear her to him.

Venom rumbled, a low, thoughtful noise. “You’re sure about that?”

“Eating the current boyfriend is really bad form. People hate it when you kill people that they like.”

“Then we will have to prove that we are _better_ than Dan.”

Eddie eyeballed Venom warily. “Please don’t turn this into a messed up romantic comedy. My life is weird enough. I don’t need to be standing underneath Anne’s apartment holding up a boombox.”

Venom eyed him right back, although his expression was more confused than anything. “What?”

“Can’t you just dig through my he-you know what?” Eddie leaned over to grab his phone, beginning to page through it to look for movie rentals. “Movie time. We’re gonna have movie time. Good distraction from eating people. Try to not take any wrong lessons from this, okay?”

The symbiote chuckled as he settled in. “Fine. But eventually I’m going to give you lessons in actually going for what you _want_.”

“Yeah, yeah, carpe diem, watch the movie.”


End file.
